fp & vista

[Bob Rasmussen]

On Fri, 13 Feb 2009, Brian K. White wrote:

> ... 
> I once played with a terminal emulator for mac that used the 3d
> hardware in the video card to render it's fonts out of vectors,
> which suggests that movies/games don't use mechanisms that aren't
> suitable to draw text.

Certainly Windows apps can run in "full zoom mode", and certainly they can 
display text in a rectangular grid. Try running Anzio, right-clicking, 
selecting zoom:Full screen no menu.

But they're still in graphics mode, where the video memory is storing 1 to 
4 bytes per pixel.

DOS apps, by contrast, store two bytes per CELL (character position), one 
for the character and one for the attribute. The video hardware then runs 
in a very different mode, where it runs those bytes through a character 
generator and rasterizes them, and from there on to the screen. I can 
certainly see that such a capability would be deprecated at some time 
about now. 

Regards,
....Bob Rasmussen,   President,   Rasmussen Software, Inc.

personal e-mail: ras at anzio.com
 company e-mail: rsi at anzio.com
          voice: (US) 503-624-0360 (9:00-6:00 Pacific Time)
            fax: (US) 503-624-0760
            web: http://www.anzio.com
 street address: Rasmussen Software, Inc.
                 10240 SW Nimbus, Suite L9
                 Portland, OR  97223  USA